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How Picture Books Reduce Complexity
- 1. WHERE THE SIMPLE THINGS ARE What Picture Books Teach Us About Reducing Complexity @Miss_Hanie · nagel.hana.@gmail.com
- 2. ANGER
- 3. REJECTION
- 5. FILIAL LOVE
- 7. COMPLICATED ▫ Predictable patterns ▫ Accurate predictions
- 8. COMPLEXITY ▫ Multiplicity ▫ Interdependence ▫ Diversity
- 13. LESSON 1 DEFINING COMPLEXITY13 LESSON 1 Complex things are complex (but manageable through design)
- 15. CONSUMERIZATION OF PRODUCTS ▫ Intuitive ▫ Anywhere, anytime ▫ Personalized
- 16. PRODUCT USERS ▫ Context ▫ Perspective
- 17. “ Good design is about making the complex simple.
- 18. “ Good design is about making the complicated simple and the complex understandable.
- 19. 2 LANDSCAPE OF COMPLEXITY19LESSON 2 Goal is not to simplify but to understand
- 20. UNDERSTAND DIFFERENCES ▫ Who benefits? ▫ What are the benefits?
- 21. LOOK FOR SIMILARITIES ▫ Environment ▫ Mental models
- 23. THANKS! You can find me at @Miss_Hanie nagel.hana@gmail.com
- 24. IMAGE SOURCES ▫ Figures 1-5, 20-23: Sendak, M. (1984). Where the wild things are. New York: Harper & Row. ▫ Figures 6-13: Erlbruch, W., & Chidgey, C. (2011). Duck, death, and the tulip. Minneapolis: Gecko Press, distributed in the United States by Lerner Pub. Group. ▫ Figures 14-16, 19: Kooser, T., & Klassen, J. (2015). House held up by trees.
Notes de l'éditeur
- (slide 1) I lead UX research for SAP Customer Experience, and in the past I worked as a Development Manager for a picture book iOS app. Today I am going to draw from both of those experiences, and talk to you about big design lessons about complexity we can learn from small picture books.
- (slide 2) Let’s review the plot of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, by Maurice Sendak, and lift the curtain on some of the complex emotional themes that are explored in this picture book. So when we first meet Max, he is dressed as a wolf – so he is a predator animal, a violent beast - and he causing destruction, acting out his anger in a tangible way. And his mother calls him a “wild thing”.
- (slide 3) And he yells back “I’ll eat you up!”, and get sent to bed without supper. So his mother creates a physical distance between them - by sending him to his room so she isolates him. And she also withholds his dinner - in storytelling food is often symbolic of maternal love and affection - so sending Max to bed without supper symbolizes rejection from his most immediate support group, his family.
- (slide 4) So now Max is feeling angry and rejected and alone, and he imagines a new world - “and the walls became the world all around”. He uses the power of imagination, of creative thought, and travels to a new land inhabited by the Wild Things. Max eventually tames the Wild Things and becomes their king. Remember, Max is actually a beast himself, so this represents Max taming his inner beast, really mastering his own base emotions and using the power of imagination to self-soothe
- (slide 5) “Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat” - despite this anger and rejection Max is feeling, he remembers the foundation of love. Upon returning to his bedroom, Max discovers a hot supper - the maternal love - is waiting for him. So he experiences these complex emotions - anger, rejection, self-soothing - and there is a surprising outcome - he learns that supper - family love - is still waiting for him Now that we are older and a bit wiser, we can appreciate that these are complex experiences - and yet this picture book manages to communicate the challenge and the solution in only a couple hundred words. What is the secret to communicating complex things?
- (slide 6) Now I want us to hold on to that thought while we explore what exactly complexity is. These next illustrations are from a picture book called Duck, Death and the Tulip, which is a surprisingly heartwarming German-language tale about death. And this picture book starts with our protagonist Duck, who one day turns around to find Death standing behind her. Terrified, she asks whether he has come to take her, but he remarks rather matter-of-factly that he has been there her entire life.
- (slide 7) In order to understand what complexity is, let’s start with contrasting it with the concept of ‘complicated’. How can we define what makes something complicated? A complicated system has many different elements interacting in a patterned way. A good example of this is a car – a car is a complicated piece of machinery, with over 30,000 parts. But because those parts are interacting with each other in patterned ways, you are able to make accurate predications about what will happen when you interact with a particular part of the system. When you put the key in the ignition and turn the key, you are able to predict that the car will turn on.
- (slide 8) Now lets compare that with complexity. A complex system has many different parts, whose patterns of interaction are constantly changing. We can break this down a bit further, and say that a complex system displays: Multiplicity: the number of interacting elements Interdependence: how connected those elements are Diversity: degree of heterogeneity So the greater the multiplicity, interdependence, and diversity, the greater the complexity.
- (slide 9) Imposed complexity has external elements like laws or regulations, which are not typically manageable
- (slide 10) Inherent complexity is intrinsic to the system, and can only managed by exiting that portion of the system.
- (slide 11) Unnecessary complexity arises from misalignment between the system, and its users’ needs
- (slide 12) Designed complexity results from choices we make - that we design - about how a system operates, what it interacts with and who it interacts with. In order to reduce design complexity, we need to eliminate anything that distracts from the primary goal, message, outcome that we intend. We really need to get to the heart of who the user is, and what they are trying to do
- (slide 13) So our first main takeaway is that complex things are complex – complexity always exists and. We need to learn how to live with it - how to mange it - through the design choices that we make.
- (slide 14) Now all of these design choices we make to manage complexity are existing in a fairly new landscape – (and these illustrations are from ‘A House Held Up By Trees’, written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, and illustrated by Jon Klassen). In the old landscape, solutions were made for enterprise needs, not for users. So they were packed full of every feature you could think of, because that’s what businesses had requested.
- (slide 15) This new landscape of complexity is shaped by what we call the ‘consumerization of products’, which means applying consumer thinking to enterprise products. This term was first used in a 2004 white paper, and it reached fever pitch around 2012 – that’s when we saw rise of products like Slack, Asana, Google’s G-suite - enterprise products that were actually pretty fun and straightforward to use. So these kinds of products share 3 characteristics: They offer an Intuitive experience: No one reads a user guide or manual anymore. We expect to the able to download something, maybe sign up or install, and then just jump right in. We also expect to be able to access these products Anytime, anywhere: phones are getting bigger and smarter, and so is the cloud = Enterprise applications should be readily available across a simple link or application button wherever context we are in (office, at home or in transit). We also expect the application to know as much about us as much we knows about the application. This is conditioned by deep personalization in applications like Netflix or Waze, where information about our habits is used to provide a tailored experience.
- (slide 16) In order to design for this kind of complexity, we need to know who our users are, because enterprise products deliver understandable solutions to complex problems by accounting for context and realities of users’ lives. Context has great implications on our behaviour. Designing around context is a hard problem because it varies moment to moment. Perspective - how do they view the world? What are their mental models? To design impactful human centered experiences, we need to take a deep dive into user psyche, behaviour, and all their influencers and motivational triggers.
- (slide 17) There’s a popular phase about design, that ‘good makes the complex simple’.
- (slide 18) But based on what we know about complexity, I want to suggest that we reframe this as: Good design is about making the *complicated simple* and the *complex understandable*.
- (slide 19) Our second main takeaway is that complex problems have complex solutions, but through understanding we can really enable our users to reach that solution But what tools can we use to enable that understanding?
- (slide 20) Enterprise products deliver solutions to complex problems, and those complex problems involve many different kinds of users. We need to understand who all the different users are - who are the different people that need to benefit from our solution? We also need to understand what their different needs, goals, and expectations are, in order to deliver solutions for the right task, at the right time (the right benefits).
- (slide 21) So user research can help us identify the differences in our users, but it can also identify the similarities in our users - in their context and their perspective. What are the similar ways in which users are viewing a problem, and how they approach a solution? And how can we draw from that similarity to deliver a product that makes their lives better?
- (slide 22) A good children’s book: does not pretend that there are simple answers to complex questions It does provides a new insights into a universal concept - something that resonates with children everywhere, and introduces that concept in a way that the users - children - can understand. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ has been translated into more than 30 languages, and is still in print almost 60 years later. Despite cultural, religious, and socio-geographic differences, children across the world are experiencing something similar - they have a shared problem and a shared solution. The picture book has very few details – it has 338 words and only one named character. We don’t know how old Max is, where he lives, if there is another parent or sibling in the household… But complex themes are communicated in a way that readers - young children - can understand, because it is presented in a way that matches their context, and their perspective. And it removes any unnecessary elements, and focuses on only the elements that the users – children – need in order to understand. When we are design solutions for complex problems, we need to ensure that we have a deep understanding of our users contexts and perspectives, and we need to remove any unnecessary elements from our solution, in order to make the right *thing*, and to make the thing *right*.